Month: September 2016

The Principality joins European Mobility Week from September 16 to 22 in partnership with the Electric Vehicle Club, Monaco Sustainable Development (MC2D) and the Monaco town council.
The objective of the event is to encourage everybody to move “differently”: on foot, by bicycle, electric vehicle, carpooling or public transport. On the weekend of September 17-18, a celebration of mobility will take place at Larvotto (next to the Rose des Vents), from 10 am to 6 pm, with free trials of two-wheeled and four-wheeled electric vehicles provided by BMW, Renault, Tesla, Go Electrix and ACM.
This is an excellent opportunity to get behind the wheel of electric vehicles such as the Twizy, Zoe, BMWI3, E-Mehari or handlebars of electric two-wheelers. The public can also try the electric bikes of CAM and the Twizy Mobee car sharing service.
The Mediterranean Institute for Studies and Sustainable Development will present and lead IMEDD games on mobility, while the little ones can participate in Bio-Logika, an educational game to raise awareness of different forms of mobility: car, bike, bus, walking … and various recreational workshops.
On the occasion of Public Transport Day, Saturday, September 17, Monaco Bus Company public buses will be free, while on Sunday, avenue Princesse Grace will be partially closed to motor vehicles in order to enable everyone, young and old, to make full use of a secure area in Larvotto for alternative personal transportation.
Three new stations for electric bikes are scheduled to enter service in Monaco, in addition to existing stations. The sites are: Palace Square, Avenue Hector Otto, and Quai Louis II. Additional sites are under consideration for the Condamine and Monte-Carlo.

Tourism figures for July and August for the PACA region show that the Bastille Day atrocity in Nice on July 14 has cost millions of euros in lost revenue.
Following a spate of cancellations immediately after the attack that took the lives of 86 people – many of them tourists – visitor numbers largely rebounded in August, from 43 million in July to 62 million in August. The combined figure for the two peak months was 105 million nights compared to 108 million last year, and tourism revenue of €6.3 billion compared to €6.6 billion in 2015.
The luxury sector was the hardest hit, with occupancy down 18 percent on the year. Nice, Cannes and Nice bore the brunt. However, almost two-thirds of tourism professionals expect a good result for September, helped in part by the continuation of warm weather.
Minister of State, Serge Telle at a press conference Friday commented on the low tourists attendance on the French Riviera: “We are different and completely involved.”
The Minister added, “Feelings of safety are probably stronger in Monaco than the other side of the border … We’ll have some tough years regarding security, and Monaco is getting prepared for it.”

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Sunday that France remains a top target for Islamist terrorists. “The threat is at its maximum, as we have seen in recent days, in recent times and even as we speak,” the head of government said several days after the discovery of a car loaded with gas cylinders in the centre of Paris and the arrest of several suspects.
He added that the security forces dismantle terror cells every week. “This week, at least two attacks were foiled,” he revealed. Valls said that the number of radicalised individuals in France known to the authorities has been revised upwards to 15,000 from 10,000.
“We have nearly 700 French jihadists and residents in France who are currently fighting in Iraq and Syria,” he said, adding that this figure included “275 women and dozens of children”. In Iraq and Syria, 196 French jihadists and residents have been killed to date, according to the Prime Minister.
Meanwhile, presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy told the Journal de Dimanche newspaper that the government is not doing enough to counter the terror threat.

Christine Lagarde, the serving head of the IMF, is to face a special French court in December, accused of negligence in the Bernard Tapie affair. Mr Tapie, who has a major interest in local French newspaper Nice-Matin, was awarded €404 million in 2008 as the result of an administrative decision when Ms Lagarde was the French Minister of Finance. The award was based on the argument that Credit Lyonnais had failed in its duty to Mr Tapie in his sale of Adidas, the footwear company, but Ms Lagarde has come under fire for not sending the case to independent arbitration. Mr Tapie, himself a former politician, has since been ordered to repay the full amount to the French state.
Mr Tapie has been a very active participant in various schemes to save the troubled Nice-Matin group in recent years, and according to the Observatoire des Journalistes et de l’Information Mediatique, an investigative journalists’ group, he continues to have a minority interest through the Nethys newspaper company, which the group claims is his “military arm in the Alpes Maritimes”.
In the meantime, Google has come to the rescue of Nice-Matin with an injection of funds to help support its digital edition, while the print run of Nice-Matin and its sister daily Monaco-Matin continue to shrink.

Prince Jacques, who will be two years old in December, was the undoubted star of the show at the traditional Monegasque picnic on Saturday. Held, according to custom, at the Parc Princesse-Antoinette, this annual event every September is an opportunity for all of Monaco’s citizens to meet and mingle with the Princely family.
On Friday, the Princess was in Geneva to mark World First Aid Day with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). A 2016 Red Cross Federation goodwill ambassador for first aid, the former Olympic swimmer said, “Today, we would like to remind the world that children are capable of saving lives — of themselves and others around them if they are equipped with first aid training.”
“I lost my cousin to drowning when he was five years old and I have some friends that have lost their children to drowning too,” she also commented.
The Princess Charlene of Monaco Foundation was founded in 2012 to save lives by putting an end to drowning.
Article first published September 11, 2016.